ExpanDrive

Don’t get me wrong, Foursquare is a fun little social network and beautifully adapted to the iPhone platform. But their points system incentivizes some activities that I think are detrimental to the environment as a whole.

So in the interests of making things more awesome, I’ve designed some Foursquare Badges intended to shame users into more appropriate behaviors:

A must-have if the Boston Top 10 is any indication.

You’re checking into the venue “Phone Booth in front of Whole Foods” from your cell phone?

Obviously, Foursquare would have to add a relationship status for this to work.

For the Mayor of your local “Starbucsk Coffee”.

Make friends with Cosmo on Foursquare and buy some shirts or mugs featuring these sweet badges.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years, you know Helvetica. It powers your iPhone. It makes your Jon Shea’s underpants. It fills out your wedding registry.

But as a typeface designed for neutrality—used unironically in tax forms and corporate media for decades—Helvetica’s current rebirth as a “hip” marketing tool almost certainly has a shelf life. And with bad tv and so-so cinema leaning heavily on the typeface to establish branding, I’d say we’re already looking at the beginning of the decline.

So what’s the next trend in the world of typograhpy? Take a look up during holiday travel this season and you can’t fail to miss it: the FHWA Series fonts, and the innumerable spin-offs they’ve inspired.

Don’t believe me? How do you think satellite radio monopolist XM is reminding everyone that they’re the future of audio communication?

And if you’re looking for a light, hip web publishing platform that redefines the nature of the blog, here’s the first thing you see:

Even Southwest Airlines, one of the most obvious competitors to the Interstate Highway System, is using the typeface to let travelers know that their bags fly free:

I can’t say why highway fonts are experiencing such a marketing revival. When legibility and quick transfer of information are not a priority, the typefaces are rather homely, with their chopped ascenders and bloated x-heights giving them a stubby, pot-bellied look.

It could be the same instincts of subversion and reinvention among designers that put Hevletica back on the marquee. Or perhaps it’s an attempt to tap America’s nostalgic association of the open road with change, freedom, and adventure.

But whatever the ethos behind it, it’s clear the long-overlooked FHWA style is making a comeback in advertising. If Helvetica is the best way to say “everyone else is doing it”, Highway Gothic is the best way to say “everyone else is doing it wrong.”

Poor, lonely <font>. You were irritating to use, and so you were kicked out of the treehouse in favor of stylesheets by HTML 4.01. But cheer up <font>; you can still be extremely annoying! Just try a Wikipedia vanity search, with a few of your pedantic modifiers thrown in for good measure—let’s use <font face=cursive size=50>:

Not only that, <font>, but your old and even more annoying buddy <table> is back in the game, too. And when you two team up,  there’s almost no limit to the amount of carnage you can create:

This works across browsers, though there are obvious differences in how they render the horribly mangled code these querys will produce. It’s the best lesson in input santization since since Little Bobby Tables.

If you’re good, you can theoretically purpetrate some serious mayhem with this bug—and considering how widely MediaWiki is used around the web, that could be a real problem.

In reality, though, the trickery is probably limited by the abilty of your dirty, dirty inputs to generate search results; without those, it looks like most of your code modifications get cancelled.

That having been said, I endorse using this exploit only for your own personal amusement, not serious destruction. You have been warned.

James Iry posted a really amusing “history” of programming languages over on his blog, One Div Zero. I laughed till I cried. He bills it as “mostly wrong,” but he’s not far from the truth.

Just for a taste, here’s one of my favourite quotes from the History

Haskell gets some resistance due to the complexity of using monads to control side effects. Wadler tries to appease critics by explaining that “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what’s the problem”

Good times

When I’m wailing on a project in bash, I frequently find myself wanting to cd back to the project root. Since we use git, this is the same as the git_root directory. So I wrote a bash function that looped through the directories in the current path and found the one that contained the .git/ directory.

Luckily, I thought to ask on #git if there was an easier way before I posted my script (because no one likes to look like a noob on their own blog). It turns out there’s a one liner. I’ve posted it here, with a little padding so that I can feel like I made a contribution.

function gr {
    ## If the current working directory is inside of 
    ## a git repository, this function will change
    ## it to the git root (ie, the directory that 
    ## contains the .git/ directory), and then print
    ## the new directory.    
    git branch > /dev/null 2>&1 || return 1
    cd "$(git rev-parse --show-cdup)".
    pwd
}

Normally, I try to keep a strict “do not feed the trolls” policy, but I’m not above a good Internet fight now and again. And let me tell you, TUAW’s “Road Test” of an OS X hacked Dell Mini 9 is certainly bad enough to risk a few punches over.

“My first real work with the mini 9 began in November, when I decided to acclimate myself to its diminutive keyboard by using it during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) to work on a novel.”

Fantastic test case for a computer designed for mobility and web access—a monumental, offline task involving hours of ass-in-chair typing. The reason people still fetishize the heavy, zero-connectivity Smith-Corona for this task is because it’s nearly perfect for it.

And yes, I have written a novel, so I would know.

“Sure, it worked for a little bit, and then began to irritate me when the gestures would fail. I decided to use a cheap micro-mouse instead, which meant that two of the USB ports were now filled — one with the cable for the mouse, and the other for the Sprint wireless broadband dongle that I use when I’m on the road.”

So wait—that’s three USB ports, which is one more than any but the most expensive Apple-branded laptop. The laptop I own only Mac laptop I can afford has only two, and since I’m stuck with the early 2006 model, other than two-fingered scroll, none of the mouse gestures work, either.

“My fingers felt like they were tripping over each other when I was typing, to the point that I found that I was actually taking longer to type emails on the mini 9 than it took me to tap them in on an iPhone!”

The choadiness and inaccuracy of my fingers is a matter of record. I’m typing this on a Mini 9, right now. Not suffering. Quotation marks are a pain. They are infinitely worse on the iPhone—the author could at least learn to lie plausibly.

“16GB is not enough capacity to load an OS, a complete office suite, and actually do some work.”

I’m sorry if this guy couldn’t run the Mail Merge Wizard, but no one I know wants a netbook so they can use Office. If you’re seriously writing blog posts in Word or coding pages in Dreamweaver, there are tons of fast, light, and awesome text editors, writing programs, and blogging tools out there for OS X. Can’t store all your music? Put it on a server and mount it with ExpanDrive. Even Photoshop has lighter alternatives.

Once the OS is on (and it fits on 8GB machines), hard drive space should be a non-issue. If not, you’re doing it wrong.

“Next, the limited screen resolution (1024 x 600) of the mini 9 made it virtually impossible to use some Mac apps that have default minimized screen sizes that are larger than that. Those apps simply had to be removed from the device, and I was stuck with a somewhat crippled hackb00k that didn’t have the software tools I normally use.”

What tools? The author is completely non-specific in what he could and couldn’t do, which is infuriating behavior for a reviewer. It’s not like he’s just avoiding brand names—aside from basic text entry, he fails to name even the tasks he attempted to carry out. How is this supposed to be helpful to anyone?

Some solutions do exist to keep peace in the battle between windows and screen space. That having been said, a netbook is “somewhat crippled” by definition. Anyone conisdering a Mini 9 needs to take careful stock of what exactly they intend to do. For broswer, mail, text editing, writing, blogging, and IM, I’ve got no beefs.

I don’t mean to belittle the author of this piece, but even his solutions are ridiculous. The 25,000 iPhone apps he cites are nothing even close to what a netbook brings you. Terminal, real SSH, multitasking, a little thing called root access, and gobs of other critical real-world features are all still only available on jailbroken phones—and I wouldn’t expect Apple to change that anytime soon. Let’s not even mention the AppStore’s strict and largely arbitrary acceptance protocol.

The sort of hybrid touch device he suggests is similarly inapplicable to this situation. It would cost far more than regular laptop, and be at least as large and cumbersome. When low cost and small size are the only reasons anyone would ever buy a netbook, I can’t see how this product would fill a similar niche.

The OS X hackbook appeals to hardscrabble, substance-over-style users who value stripped-down, efficient tools. The author of this post owns a MacBook Air, which, with its ludicrous debut price and limited features, is the epitome of all we hate about Apple. Working with a Mini 9 doesn’t live up the Jobsian Ideal, but for those of us who can manage sleeping on a bed with fewer than four pillows, it’s a Mac by any other name.

OS X is a phenomenal work environment. I’d never chose to use anything else. But for way too long, it’s been chained to machines that are, if not overpriced, certainly a financial hardship. The ability to elude this monetary burden, combined with optimized portability, is a fantastic thing—and you shouldn’t need to be the World’s Toughest Writer to appreciate that.

This is not a joke. The Gmail team has enabled an “Undo Send” feature in Gmail Labs. There’s no black magic or voodoo; it just holds onto your message for five seconds in case you want a panic take-back. After that, the email is gone and un-recallable, just like normal.

I rarely use the Gmail web interface, but I’ve thought about writing a Mail.app plugin to do this for years. I can’t count how many times I’ve tried to scramble into the “Sending…” folder and delete a message before it escapes. I’ve never once pulled it off.